


Support Group

by Rakefetzyz



Category: Daredevil (TV), Jessica Jones (TV), Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Adopted Children, Adoption, Blindness, Family History, Friendship, Gen, Guilt, Loss of Parent(s), School Assignments, Secret Identity, Survivor Guilt, Teenagers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-29
Updated: 2018-12-30
Packaged: 2019-04-30 07:28:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14491884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rakefetzyz/pseuds/Rakefetzyz
Summary: At sixteen Matt finds an on-line support group for teens who have lost their families. There are two girls in the group called Jessica and Kara.





	1. The Group

**Author's Note:**

> I did not give this a rating, but I would think it's about PG13 for language.

Blindness could be so frustrating! True, Matt's other senses were more acute than those of anybody he knew. And he had developed a kind of radar that let him sense the positions and motions of everything around him.  


But none of that helped when it came to computers. He needed a computer with special assistive technology and they didn't have one at the orphanage. That was why he didn't find the group until his junior year in high school. It was then he finally got permission to use one of the computers in the resource room for visual impairments. He had permission to use the computer whenever he liked because he was an outstanding student. By that time the two girls had been exchanging messages for almost a year.  


The two girls were the whole group when Matt found it, but they claimed they were always looking out for new members. It was a group for teens who had lost their entire families as older kids.  


Matt explained that he had never known his mother and that his father died when he was ten. He was now sixteen years old, he was living in an orphanage, and he had no other family.  


The girls decided to bring him into the group. Their histories were different from Matt's and more similar to each other’s. Both lost their families in early adolescence, both were from two-parent families before their tragedies, and both were adopted shortly after.  


Jessica introduced herself to Matt first. She told him she grew up in the suburbs in her “before” life. She didn't say exactly where, only that it was near streets called Birch Street and Higgins Road. Her parents and younger brother died in a car accident. She was adopted by a single woman with a teen daughter. The woman made it clear she only did it for the publicity. She couldn't care less about her new daughter, but Jessica did become close with the sister. Not surprisingly, Jessica hated anything to do with adoption.  


“You bastard!” was her reaction when Matt mentioned the orphanage.  


Matt thought she might try running away, hoping the orphanage could take her in. But he put a stop to that by telling her it was run by nuns. She said she had no use for “religious bullshit.”  


Jessica didn’t mention the tremendous strength or the other unusual powers she had since she came out of her coma after the accident. That was weird and nobody would believe it, anyway.  


Kara sent Matt an introduction too. She outright refused to tell where she grew up. She said only that her parents were killed in a “natural disaster.” She lost her extended family too, including a baby cousin. She was adopted by a couple who also had a teenage daughter. Like Jessica, she became close with her new sister. Unlike Jessica, she had adoptive parents who truly cared about her and they all came to love each other.  


She said she still grieved her parents and her “birth culture.” So Matt guessed it was an inter-country adoption. But Kara was happy to be adopted. She was sorry that Matt had to live in an impersonal place like an orphanage. If her adoptive father had not died, she felt sure she could have convinced the family to adopt Matt, too.  


Kara didn't mention the unusual abilities she had because of Earth’s yellow sun. The Danvers had drilled into her how important it was to keep all that secret. Besides it was weird and probably no one would believe it, anyway.  


Nearly a year earlier, Trish recommended a different online support group for Jessica.  


“Jess, you have to get on this chat group for adopted teens. “  


Jessica decided to give it a try. Maybe some of the kids would get how angry and guilt ridden she felt. No one did. Most of the kids were adopted young. They were angry, but they were angry because they felt abandoned and cut off from their biological families. They hated their birth families for not parenting and they hated their adoptive families because they weren't the biological families.  


Jessica couldn't relate. Her own family was far from perfect. Her parents fought, her kid brother was annoying and she herself was a pouty new adolescent. But she didn’t hate or resent them. She missed them and felt forever burdened by guilt for causing their deaths.  


The kids who were adopted more recently didn't get Jessica either. They were all grinning like dorks because they finally had real homes after bouncing around in the foster care system for years.  


Jessica was about to ditch the whole lame group when a girl named Kara joined.  


Alex recommended the adoption group to Kara.  


“It’s a group for kids like you, adopted teens."  


Like her? Kara didn’t think there was anyone on the planet Earth who was like her. But she agreed to give it a try. Most of the kids couldn't even remember their biological families. Others had never had a stable home life before.  


Only one girl named Jessica lost her whole family recently too. She didn't lose her planet and her culture but Kara saw the similarities.  


It seemed that Jessica saw them, too.  


“Let's get off this half-assed group for misfits and start our own,” she messaged Kara.  


Kara agreed, but she used more polite language to say so. She was something of a misfit herself. She guessed anyone would be if they had to change planets at age thirteen. But she had more in common with Jessica than the rest so she agreed.  


When they left the group they started communicating by email instead of the chat channel. But they continued posting notices looking for other teens who may have lost their whole families, too.  


Almost a year later, Matt found them.  


When he sent his introduction message he didn't tell them he was blind. This wasn't a support group for blind kids. Sister Beatrice already made him join a real life group for teens with visual impairments. Any blindness issues could be discussed there. And he didn't mention his unusual senses. That was just weird, he never told anyone, and nobody would believe it, anyway.  


Instead, he talked about his early life with his father. He told them his dad was murdered for not throwing a fight. “It was my fault. He knew how badly I wanted him to win.”  


“Asshole!” Jessica responded. “Any ten-year-old would want his dad to win. My brother was ten and he couldn't force my parents to do anything. “  


But Jessica felt guilt ridden, too. “I caused the accident. My dad turned his eyes from the road to look at me because I took Phillip's game.”  


Matt had never been on a road trip. His dad had not even owned a car. But he knew from the kids at school that back seat bickering was the norm, not the exception and he said so.  


“Everyone does that. You were just really unlucky.”  


Each of them understood how senseless the other's guilt was, but they couldn't stop feeling guilty themselves.  


Kara chimed in too. Wherever she came from and whatever the disaster was, she knew she didn’t cause her parents’ deaths. But she suffered from survivor guilt. It seemed her folks had enough warning to send her away just in time.  


“I should have stayed and died with them,” she wrote. “It’s wrong that only I escaped.” She said she was supposed to take care of her little cousin. But something went wrong. Matt and Jessica assumed she couldn't find him.  


“Don't you get it, you idiot!” Jessica messaged. “Telling you to care for the baby was probably just an excuse to get you to agree to go. They knew you wouldn't want to leave them there.”  


Matt agreed. “It must have comforted their last moments to know that you were safe.”  


Kara understood in her mind that they were probably right, but her heart wouldn't let her believe it.


	2. It Takes One to Know One

Matt wasn't interested in exchanging photos.  


“Can't you just describe yourselves?” he asked when Jessica suggested it.  


“Can't you just look at the pics, dumbass?” she responded.  


“Actually, no,” Matt had to explain.  


Of course that brought up all the questions about blindness that he had hoped to avoid. But the girls couldn’t help being curious.  


No, he wasn’t born blind, he replied to them. There was a traffic accident when he was nine. It involved a truck carrying toxic chemicals that splashed in his eyes.  


How could he use a computer, they wanted to know. How did he manage all the everyday stuff?  


So he told them about the accessible computer in the resource room and how he put Braille labels on his clothes. Yes, he used a cane and read Braille. He could study as well as anyone and was considering going into law when he was older. No, he wasn’t thinking about getting a dog.  


“Now can we get back on topic, please?”  


Kara sent Jessica a private warning that Matt was getting tired of their questions. But she thought it was a shame about the dog. She had a cat named Streaky and knew how comforting an animal companion could be. However, both girls agreed to return to the purpose of the group.  


Next, Kara slipped. She overheard the high school girls bullying Alex.  


“I hate the way they pick on her because she's my sister.”  


But she heard them when she was out in the school yard and they were in a music room. Jessica didn’t pick up on it, but Matt did. He had practice determining whether conversations could have been heard with regular hearing or not. No way should Kara have heard the bullies. Not unless... But how did she come to have enhanced hearing?  


He felt uncomfortable asking directly.  


“Do you know if Kara can do anything unusual?” he asked Jessica.  


Jessica was stunned because she thought she was the one with unusual abilities. And why was Matt bringing it up, anyway? Still she started looking more carefully at Kara’s messages.  


But Jessica herself was the next to slip. She said she helped her sister move a car out of the way when someone pinned her into her parking space. This time Kara picked up on it. She knew how much strength it took to move a parked car, but believed she was the only girl her age who could do it. Not that the Danvers allowed her to lift cars in public. But how could Jessica… ?  


Jessica's family were regular Earth humans unless she had lied about it.  


Kara confronted Jessica in a private email.  


Jessica admitted her uncanny strength but insisted she had no idea where it came from. She went into a coma after her accident and woke up with strange powers.  


“Now explain why you asked, smartass,” she demanded, recalling Matt's suspicions.  


Kara felt she owed Jessica an explanation. After all, Jessica had admitted to “super" strength herself.  


“I’m strong enough to move a car, too,” she replied.  


That surprised Jessica. “Matt thinks you have enhanced hearing.”  


Well, she did have that, too, Kara admitted. “But how does Matt know?”  


When confronted, Matt acknowledged that he also had unusually powerful hearing. They were open about their own “abilities” so he decided he owed them that.  


“Wait a minute,” Jessica demanded. “You're saying you’re blind AND you have “abilities?”  


That was about the size of it, Matt answered. The stuff that splashed in his eyes caused both.  


After several rounds of questions and explanations they all told the others exactly what they could do.  


Jessica had “super” strength and could jump safely from roofs or high floors, almost flying.  


Matt had enhanced senses, hearing that let him tune in on heartbeats as well as distant conversations, touch that could sometimes discern ink on a printed page. He also had non-visual spatial awareness.  


Kara could do everything the others could, plus more, including true flight. She had to tell them she was an alien to explain it. But by that time they were starting to trust each other because they wanted their own secrets kept, too.  


Jessica had a bone to pick with Matt. “Only a serious asshole would pose as a disabled person. ”  


Matt pointed out that Kara was pretending to be an ordinary teen girl. He was posing as an regular blind guy. He wasn’t taking any services under false pretenses because he really did need assistive technology and Braille texts or audio recordings. He was only faking less awareness of his surroundings than he actually had.  


“You told us you can feel regular print on a page,” Jessica accused him.  


That was true sometimes, he replied. But it wasn’t practical.  


“It’s easier and faster to feel patterns of dots than it is to feel letter shapes. That’s why Louis Braille came up with the system in the first place.”  


That’s an effing lame excuse.” Jessica refused to believe it.  


“Try it the next time you're in an elevator that has Braille markings next to engraved or raised numbers.”  


Jessica lived in New York, a city full of elevators. She tried it the next day and grudgingly concluded that Matt was right. It was awkward to feel indented numbers, especially the rounded shapes of threes and fives. Braille dots fit under a fingertip and could be felt in a second. She would have no idea what the dots meant without the numbers next to them, but she got the point.  


Kara couldn’t find an accessible elevator in Midvale. She had to wait until the family took a trip to National City to try it. Then she discovered that Matt was right, too.  


“But why pose at all?” Jessica demanded.  


Once he had a special teacher named Stick, Matt answered. The guy left before completing Matt's training. But he impressed on his protégé that there were mysterious forces of evil who held grudges against people with “gifts.” It was prudent to hide it.  


Kara knew all about the forces of evil, too. That was why her new family insisted that she hide who she really was. She thought Matt was wise to pretend.  


“But I do wish I could use my powers to rescue people.”  


She told them that when she first came to Earth she saved a mother and baby from a burning car. Her parents forbade her to do anything like that again because of the risk of exposure.  


Matt yearned to save people too. Like Kara, he wanted to rescue victims, but he also felt an urge to beat the tar out of the perpetrators. “Starting with the thugs who killed my dad.”  


Kara only wanted to help people in trouble. She felt the bad ones could be turned over the to police and the justice system.  


“Ha!” Jessica commented. “You're not the one interested in pursuing a law career. Mister ‘beat the tar out of them’ is.”  


Jessica herself scorned any kind of heroism. At the same time, she refused to hide. Yeah, she preferred to blend in. She didn’t go around looking for opportunities to show off her strength. But if the need arose, like with Trish’s car, she used her powers and she didn’t care who saw. If someone didn't like it, that was their problem.  


Both Kara and thought it a foolhardy attitude. But try telling Jessica that.  


Next Jessica questioned whether they should continue looking for other teens who had lost their families now that the threesome had turned into a group with “abilities" as well.  


At first Jessica said no. “The chances of another teen with “abilities” finding us are about seven hundred billion to one.”  


“It may not be coincidence that brought the three of us together,” Matt objected. “We may have found each other for a reason.” He didn’t mention Catholicism or divine intervention. No sense in provoking Jessica to blasphemy.  


Kara agreed. But she refrained from bringing Roa into it. For some reason mentioning Roa made Earth people act strange.  


In the end they took a vote and decided two to one to continue posting the notices.  


As Kara put it, you never knew who might turn up or from where.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I regularly use an accessible elevator. The buttons are on a metal panel and the Braille is made of raised metal bumps. These are probably easier for inexperienced fingers to feel than than raised paper dots. But it really is easier to feel the dots than to feel numbers.You can try the experiment yourself.  
> More information about Braille and how Louis Braille developed it can be found at the American Foundation for the Blind.  
> http://www.afb.org/info/living-with-vision-loss/braille/what-is-braille/123


	3. Family History Project

You wouldn't think a small thing like a baby photo could cause so much difficulty. But not one of them, Kara nor Jessica nor Matt, had one. That was the first assignment that gave them trouble.

Kara met with the problem last year, when she was asked to bring in a baby picture for her middle school graduation. The idea was to place each student's baby picture next to their eighth grade school photo in the yearbook. But no photo of Kara before the age of thirteen had ever existed.

She explained to Jessica and Matt that her people had a different technology for creating images, one that involved holographic projection.

“So what did you do?” Matt asked her.

Kara hadn’t known what to do at all. In the end Alex told their Mom. Eliza Danvers went in to talk to the teacher and managed to have the whole project changed. The eighth graders chose quotations to place under their photos instead.

“Lucky bitch!” Jessica complained. When she had that problem, Dorothy Walker told her to get over it and not to make an embarrassing fuss.

“You mean you don’t have a baby photo either?” That surprised Kara. Jessica was Earth born.

Jessica explained that when she went to collect her things from the house she lived in before the accident, “Mommy Dearest” refused to wait for her to gather more than her clothes and a few items from her room. There was no time to look for pictures, her hidden diary, or any other treasured processions.

“What did you do about the assignment, then?” Kara wanted to know.

Everyone except Jessica brought in a baby picture. Those bitches used them to form a big display on the main bulletin board in the hall. Only Jessica wasn’t included.

When no one was looking, she may have just happened to bring a can of spray paint and vandalize the display.

“We’re you caught?” Matt inquired.

No, she had been careful. Dorothy did suspect, but she cared more about avoiding embarrassing publicity than informing the school.

Matt told the girls that he hated the picture assignment too.

For him it came up at the sixth grade end-of-year party. Everyone was supposed to bring a baby photo and the kids were supposed to guess which photo was whose. Not a very tactful activity for a class with a blind student, even if Matt had processed a photo to bring in.

“Why don’t you have a photo?” both girls asked.

It was similar to Jessica's story. When his dad died, some people from their church packed up the apartment and helped Matt move into the orphanage. They meant well, but apparently they assumed that a blind kid would have no use for photos. Matt himself was too grief-stricken to pay much attention to the packing and the pictures were lost.

He wouldn't have minded so much, except it made everybody feel sorry for the poor blind orphan who didn’t have a photo. If there was one thing Matt couldn’t abide it was any kind of pity.

Somehow they all got over the non-existent baby photos and moved on.

Kara was much more disturbed by a new assignment, the family history project.

She loved the Danvers and she was happy to be part of the family. But Kara Danvers was only one part of her. It wasn’t her heritage, her roots.

She was a daughter of the House of El. She longed to write about her birth ancestors. It was hard to bear the thought of a family history that didn’t include her parents, Zor-El and Alura, her Uncle Jor-El and Aunt Lara and their son Kal-El, her Aunt Astra, who had taught her about the stars. She knew the names and all the important positions held by members of the noble House of El for many generations.

It was too dangerous to write about them. Yet, writing only about the Danvers was denying an important part of her being.

Jessica scoffed at Kara’s dilemma. When she had to do a family history project last year, Dorothy again told her not to make a scene.

“You will do your project on the Walker family, to show your gratitude to me for taking you in.”

Jessica said nothing, only sneered and rolled her eyes at her adoptive mother. Then she wrote her project about the Jones family. Why should she write about the Walkers? She wasn’t a Walker; she had refused to change her surname.

There was no one left to ask for information, so Jessica wrote from memory. What she couldn’t remember and couldn't ask, she invented. She got away with almost all of it. The teacher was suspicious of her claim to be second cousin to the Dutch royal family, but believed the rest.

When the teacher met with Dorothy and told her about Jessica’s project, Dorothy was livid. But it was too late for her to do anything about it.

Matt, like Kara, was facing the project this year. There was no adoptive family in his case. His problem was purely lack of information. He had never met any of his mother's family and knew nothing about her except her name. That meant a whole side of the family he couldn’t write about. His knowledge of his dad’s family was also limited. His grandfather died before he was born and his grandmother when he was still quite young. He remembered that after his grandmother died, his dad brought home the family Bible. It had a page with names going several generations back.

But the church people who packed up the apartment had also assumed that Matt would have no use for print books. There were few print books in any case, since Matt was using Braille and his dad had never been much of a reader. He wished they had saved the Bible for him though. Someone could have read out the names for him. He didn’t want to be the poor blind orphan who couldn’t do an assignment again.

“Invent something, dumbass,” Jessica told him. “Those teachers are too stupid to know the difference.”

But Matt didn’t want to make up his family history.

“Then investigate,” Jessica responded. “Find out what happened to your Bible.”

Matt decided to go talk to the priest at his childhood church. He had not been there since his dad's funeral because the orphanage was attached to a convent that had a different priest.

The priest in his old church was a severe, unapproachable man. Matt didn’t really expect much assistance.

To his surprise, he found a new priest when he got there. The priest introduced himself as Father Lantom and listened sympathetically to Matt's story. Father Lantom promised to hunt for the lost Bible.

“There's a good chance it’s still in the church on a bookshelf somewhere,” he told Matt.

A week later a package arrived for Matt at the orphanage. It contained the missing Bible and also a note in Braille, listing all the Murdock family names and dates.

Matt still knew zilch about his mother's side, but at least he could do the project now.

That was great for Matt, Kara thought. But neither Matt nor Jessica could think of a solution for her.

In the end, Alex came to the rescue. She had done a project on the Danvers family a year earlier. She suggested that Kara rework the project a little and hand that in at school.

“Afterwards do a private project on your birth family, but show it only to Mom and me.”

Even Eliza agreed, though she always insisted that Kara do her own school work even if Alex had done it before and was willing for Kara to copy it. This time it wasn’t really cheating because Kara was going to do an original project, too. She just wasn’t going to hand it in.

Kara spent one evening reworking Alex's family history. Then she spent a week enumerating the proud history of the House of El. No one at school ever saw it. But Kara felt complete and whole, for once acknowledging her true self.

Jessica maintained that any teacher who didn’t take special situations like adoption and loss of family into account, when giving out assignments, deserved the bullshit she had written in her project last year.

“But now that you two have stopped whining about it,” she concluded. “There are other things we need to talk about.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More information on school assignments that can be problematic for adopted students, students in foster care and so on can be found here:
> 
> www.rainbowkids.com/adoption-stories/troublesome-family-based-school-assignments-2054
> 
> This was written before Daredevil season 3 came out. In season 1 Matt seemed surprised and even a bit alarmed that Father Lantom knew he was Jack Murdock’s son. That’s why I assumed that Father Lantom was not his childhood priest.


	4. Mothers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Takes place in the present.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wasn't planning to bring this story into the present, but then all three of their mothers showed up.

Jessica guessed she had better let Kara know about Matt and Midland Circle.

She had stopped answering the support group messages when she dropped out of college. The other two were doing well in their academic careers. Why tell them what a loser she was, dropping out?

She thought of Matt and Kara sometimes, but so much crap was going on in her own life. Stirling, then Kilgrave , Trish's struggles with addiction, plus her own craving for alcohol left her little time or desire to renew the correspondence. 

She wouldn’t have stayed friends with Kara in any case. Not after Miss Prissy put on that idiotic costume. The only good thing Jessica could say about Kara's costume was that it didn’t have dorky horns that looked like ears.

She hadn’t kept up with Matt either, not until their real life meeting ended with Jessica leaving him to be crushed under an imploded building. For days afterwards she hit one bottle after another drinking through the guilt of causing yet another death.

Kara was away from Earth during the events of Midland Circle. But Jessica sometimes heard about Supergirl.

News stories reported that Kara's Kryptonian mother had returned with her to Earth and helped Kara fight the Worldkillers. When Miss Sunshine's mother reappeared from the dead, she and Kara jumped right back into a normal relationship. Kara’s resurrected mother wasn’t a monster like hers, a monster that Jessica recognized as an exaggerated version of herself.

Alura left Earth again while Kara chose to stay. But Kara knew her mom was alive and well. Kara’s adoptive sister didn’t kill her mother. That bitch led a charmed life where everything always had a happy ending. It made Jessica want to barf. 

Still Kara deserved to know about Matt. For a PI armed with a class full of whiskey, it was a matter of minutes to find Kara's current email address at Catco. She sent only a brief message to the gist of “I thought you’d want to know…”

Kara's response was much friendlier than Jessica's message, half grieving for Matt and half delighted to hear from Jessica again.

“Jessica, how are you? I’ve missed you!”

It sounded so genuine that Jessica decided to fill her in a little about the doings under Midland Circle.

“You’re a hero Jessica. In their own way the Hand was just as much a threat to Earth as the Worldkillers.”

A hero? Not after leaving Matt to die. She made it clear that the term pissed her off.

Kara left that subject and asked about Jessica’s personal life. 

Somehow Jessica found herself telling Kara about the sudden reappearance of her mother, how dangerous Alisa was because of uncontrolled powers, and how Trish killed her in the end.

Kara said she understood exactly what Jessica must be going through.

“How could you understand?” Jessica demanded. “When _your_ mother turned up _your_ sister didn’t kill her"

“No,” Kara replied. “But Alex killed my Aunt. She killed Astra.”

“Astra? Who was Astra?” Jessica wanted to know more.

“Astra posed a threat to Earth,” Kara told her. “But I had suddenly found her again. I remembered sitting on her lap and how she would teach me the names of the stars. I thought everyone else from my childhood was dead. I didn’t want to admit how dangerous Astra was. In the end Alex killed her.” 

Jessica thought of Alisa returning with her brutal new personality and yet with memories of how Jessica had pretended to be too cool for the amusement park.

She grudgingly admitted that Miss Cockeyed Optimist probably did understand what she was going through. At least she came closer to understanding than anyone else.

“Weren’t you furious at your sister?” Jessica asked.

“Someone else took the blame,” Kara replied. “I was so angry at him, I couldn’t stand looking at him. When Alex saw that, she confessed that it was really her.”

“And you forgave her?” Jessica asked, astounded.

“Yes I did,” Kara replied. “Alex knew that Astra was a threat. But she also knew how I felt about my aunt. She did it because she loved me.”

“Strange way to show love,” Jessica commented.

But Kara continued, “I think it was the same for Trish and your mother. You should forgive her, Jessica.”

Jessica wasn't totally convinced. But she agreed to think about it.

To change the subject she wrote Kara about Oscar and Vido and how Vido thought that Jessica was a “super lady" like Kara.

Kara was happy to hear about the romance. She informed Jessica that her own recent involvement with an alien from a planet near hers had not worked out in the end. Now Kara was trying to concentrate more on her career.

Jessica decided that maybe Kara's life was not as charmed as she thought.

“If you’re ever in New York,” she suggested, “I'll bet Vido would be thrilled to meet a real superhero."

Kara realized that was as close to an invitation for a reunion as she was likely to get from Jessica.

“I’ll try to get to New York soon,” she messaged back, smiling to herself.

Being in touch with Kara again made Jessica think about their old support group and that got her thinking more about Matt.

She had heard rumors of a masked vigilante in Hell's Kitchen who dressed in black the way Matt did before he started flaunting the stupid horns. One night while she perched on a fire escape waiting to photograph a cheating husband, she caught sight of the man in black. His stance and his way of moving replicated Matt’s.

Was there any way that could be possible?

Jessica was there under Midland Circle when Matt remained behind and had witnessed the explosion. She and Luke and Danny got out with only moments to spare. Luke might have survived if he had found an air pocket or Kara might have survived if she had been there. But Matt had no special skin or invulnerability. Jessica didn’t see how he could have made it out. Still, somehow she couldn’t shake the idea from her mind.

When news reports came of Daredevil reappearing in the costume and wreaking havoc as a murderer, Jessica knew that guy was an imposter for sure. But the man in black kept her doubt alive. 

If Matt was alive he had some explaining to do. What right did that asshole have to let her believe she had left him to die? 

Finally Jessica confronted Matt’s friend Nelson at his family's butcher shop.

Soon after both Jessica and Kara received email from Matt.

Matt admitted to them that he was in fact alive. He had been so badly wounded both physically and spiritually that he had allowed even Nelson and Page to go on believing he was dead. 

Jessica got that he was severely injured physically. She had seen the building crash down on him. The spiritual part gave her more trouble. Her attitude toward religion had not changed since she was a newly orphaned teenager. Still no use for that bullshit.

Kara got the religious part better, although her own religion was not one that Earth people recognized.

Matt went on to tell them that he was ready now to return to the land of the living. And he was ready to resume correspondence if Kara and Jessica wanted that.

“I know this sounds crazy,” he concluded, “but my mother turned up.”

“Here we go again,” was Kara's unexpected reply.

“Get in line!” came from Jessica.

“What's that supposed to mean?” Matt asked them.

“Listen buster, you can't return from the dead and not expect to have some catching up to do,” Jessica messaged.

“Then fill me in please,” Matt requested of them. 

Emails started flying as Kara and Jessica did their best to bring him up to date.


End file.
